Tag: james lindsay

This is one of two videos made for the Mendel Art Gallery by Lisa Folkerson. It is a great example of why Castle If is one of Toronto’s most captivating performers. Channeling the sensual warmth of Berlin School electronics and robot-pop vocals she bops and sways to her alluring arpeggios while lush vegetation, cascading waters falls are blanketed around her. Though the music moves at a clicking beetle’s pace, Castle If channels a lesser known spirit of New Age. It touches the part of the brain that makes you move like your soul is on fire.

De l’emprise cosmique de James Lindsay:
(Traduit par l’euphorie astrale de Julie Mayer)

More mindfucking than Captain Beefheart at his weirdest; noisier than the most ferocious No Wave; angrier than The Fugs confronting Nixon (“Destroy America! … Shit on Canada! … Boil Defanbaker!” screams Bill Exley on “Destroy the Nations”). No Record captures all the unspoken chaos of the ’60s and imposes itself on the listener so forcefully it leaves a permanent impression that falls short of the concept of taste. Terms like “good” and “bad” become useless as the Nihilist Spasm Band doesn’t give a damn if the audience is entertained or not. Be sure to check out the excellent liner notes by Weird Canada’s own Jesse Locke with contributions from Darcy Spidle (Divorce Records/Obey Convention), Sydney Koke (Shearing Pinx/The Courtneys), Man Made Hill, and more.

Are the sonic wanderings of Can too tight for you? Is the Art Ensemble of Chicago too tied to tradition for your liking? Maybe you’re the kind of person who listens to the musique concrète of Pierre Shaeffer and wishes it was awash in drone? If so, stop whatever you had planned for the next little while and tune in to Radio Lucifer. Led by Avery Strok, this loose collaboration of musicians (including Moonwood, Toronto’s king and queen of desert-kraut) explore the furthest outer limits of the free-space sound so popular with the kids of the fifth dimension these days. So deep do these cosmonauts travel, leaving psych-rock to total abstraction, that one wonders if the return trip is even possible.

Some music seems too big for itself. Like an ancient encyclopedia with entries on folk, blues, post-punk, opera, and chamber music that sits on a shelf next to a pretty little wilting plant on one side and lonely fish in a bowl on the other — and you wonder how that tome doesn’t bring the whole bookcase crashing down. So big are the sounds here, so crackling with emotion that the perfect place to see it live would be somewhere old and wooden: a huge hall usually saved for ceremonies, lit by hundreds of candles, flickering and warm. Or, if not live, then as a soundtrack to a movie that takes place in a very old, grey city, where two lovers lose each other and have to spend a cold night wandering the wet streets searching for the other. It would be autumn, and most of the citizens of this city would also be cold, but some kind souls would extend their hands in help. In the end the lovers would find one another, but not after losing something else that they could never get back.

Some music seems too big for itself. Like an ancient encyclopedia with entries on folk, blues, post-punk, opera, and chamber music that sits on a shelf next to a pretty little wilting plant on one side and lonely fish in a bowl on the other — and you wonder how that tome doesn’t bring the whole bookcase crashing down. So big are the sounds here, so crackling with emotion that the perfect place to see it live would be somewhere old and wooden: a huge hall usually saved for ceremonies, lit by hundreds of candles, flickering and warm. Or, if not live, then as a soundtrack to a movie that takes place in a very old, grey city, where two lovers lose each other and have to spend a cold night wandering the wet streets searching for the other. It would be autumn, and most of the citizens of this city would also be cold, but some kind souls would extend their hands in help. In the end the lovers would find one another, but not after losing something else that they could never get back.

De l’ancienne encyclopédie de James Lindsay:
(Traduit par le cerveau assoiffé de connaissance de Louis-Félix Pellerin)

Like a deeply puzzling method of musical therapy, Partli Cloudi’s psychedelic “rock” is dragged through the Burroughsian cut-up technique and fed chopped ‘n’ screwed sizzurp. Down-tuned guitars wander in a garden of sound effects and warbled synths with the loner cast out from a drum circle, asked to leave for refusing to play nice with the others. Found samples of answering machine apologies, drug trip descriptions, dream theory and spiritual self-improvement monologues act as our guides, leading us through a cognitive talking cure. It may not help us put the pieces back together, but rather shows that we were never broken in the first place.

Like a deeply puzzling method of musical therapy, Partli Cloudi’s psychedelic “rock” is dragged through the Burroughsian cut-up technique and fed chopped ‘n’ screwed sizzurp. Down-tuned guitars wander in a garden of sound effects and warbled synths with the loner cast out from a drum circle, asked to leave for refusing to play nice with the others. Found samples of answering machine apologies, drug trip descriptions, dream theory and spiritual self-improvement monologues act as our guides, leading us through a cognitive talking cure. It may not help us put the pieces back together, but rather shows that we were never broken in the first place.

The long awaited, highly anticipated long player from Hamilton’s champions, WTCHS, feels like their patient maturation has finally paid off. After a string of well curated split cassettes, 7”s and a lathe, It’s Not a Cross, It’s a Curse! finally delivers lengthier, meatier recordings that can hold a candle to the intensity of their pummeling live shows. What once was gloomy cave-pop has been blown-up into cavernous death-rock that hits as hard as METZ’s noise-grunge, while still carrying a similar musicianship and melodic charm in the spirit of the Dischord post-hardcore ilk. Hear and see them now before the rest of the world takes them away.

On his most recent blow job, sax man Brodie West takes his easygoing solarium-jazz ensemble, Eucalyptus, away from the tropical lounges they previously haunted to smokier speakeasies. Here, the septet gives the arrangements more freedom to nod and sway away under the dim lights of table candles. This whirl-around feels slightly sad, as if the night is almost over and the music knows it. It reluctantly unwinds itself while it’s still dark, before the sun comes up and the basement-bar’s patrons have to face the day.

Here’s a fantasy 7” that never was, but should have been, from Hamilton’s once lost but now found golden sons, Simply Saucer. This song and its notorious chorus, from the group’s legendary posthumous LP Cyborgs Revisited, finds the Steeltown cosmic-punks phasing out of their usual MC5 interstellar overdrive and basking in the warm glow of a big star. The b-side delivers a revved up live version that makes you want to add a date to your time machine’s itinerary. Many thanks to Mammoth Cave for making this happen, and to Ugly Pop for coming up with the “what if” single concept.

A shimmering shard broken off from a kosmische comet, Benjamin Oginz’ Mystic Triangle loses the astral guitar swarms, but emphasizes much of the minimal darkness found on the near perfect debut of his other cosmic project, Mimico. While staying true to his school of modulation, this hypnotic gothic will appeal to downer-loving late night bat cave smokers and early morning sun rise meditators alike.

Divorce Records’ first offering from its classical cassette imprint, Heavy Fog, is a study in the massive emotional impact that can be made with utmost minimalism. Cello, piano, autoharp, kalimba, melodica, pitch pipe, and bird call all make up the sophisticated junkyard orchestra. These tiptoe around Nick Storring’sAigre-Douce movements like a wandering, sleeping sickness, inducing only the most essential sounds before putting them to rest and moving on. The second half of the program, Daniel Brandes’Intimations of Melody, sheds away even more superfluous resonance, leaving only the most necessary notes to construct a delicately humming, devotional giant. The overall feel is akin to hearing a newly constructed instrument being played for the first time. Imagine it as very large, made out of petrified wood and with many steel stings to be bowed and plucked. Now imagine that instrument being played by careful hands on a winter beach, and you start to get an idea of this beautiful bleakness.